Title

Author

Date of Award

3-21-2013

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Operations Research

Department

Department of Operational Sciences

First Advisor

Raymond R. Hill, PhD.

Abstract

The KC-46 program is bringing on-line the replacement aircraft for the KC-135. Although not a new development program, but rather a modification program, there are extensive plans for the flight testing of the KC-46. Recent DoD emphasis mandates the use of statistical design principles for DoD test and evaluation. This project will examine the planned flight test program for KC-46 and reconsider components of that program based on principles of statistical rigor. Of particular focus will be the reliability and maintainability aspects of the flight test program. Current methodology assumes a constant failure rate in all situations, implying that the underlying failure profile of any component or system is assumed to be exponentially distributed. Use of the Weibull failure distribution is proposed as a more general framework to provide additional insight about the failure profile of the component or system.